The Commando's Creed

The Commando's Creed is what everyone on our team lives by. Read below to learn what we believe and how we interact with each and our clients.

“Reality”

Fact #1

Software development is a creative process. We expect the requirements to change, and so our customer contracts and team processes allow for change. We welcome change, because it is the product of learning about our customers.

Fact #2

A Software Product is the final accumulation of thousands of technical decisions, most of which can only be discovered during implementation. When they are discovered and implemented, the overall design of the product is validated.

Fact #3

Software requirements change because:

They represent a software product that doesn’t exist, so most requirements are technical and business assumptions based on non existing functionality. Assumptions are gambles.

It is impossible to foresee all the hidden costs of Fact #2.

External forces like changing markets and trends will also change requirements.

“I”

As an individual I pride myself on my versatility. I am not afraid of taking on new paradigms, technologies or programming languages. I am hungry for those opportunities.

I am responsible. I take ownership for tasks and I do whatever needs to be done to make them work.

I am collaborative. I can objectively recognize my current individual limits so I gladly collaborate with others on solutions.

I love to be challenged because it makes victory sweeter.

I acknowledge that my skills are sharpened through tough development tasks. Although a task can be rightfully frustrating, I persist to complete it using my knowledge and my tools and leaning or ultimately asking for assistance from other skillful individuals on my team.

I never work an unhealthy amount of hours, and I strive for a maintainable and productive pace.

I suggest possible solutions every time I bring up a problem.

I constantly hone my English skills. I am able to fully understand English conversations. Moreover, I am able to give feedback, engage in constructive criticism, give insightful disagreements, and generate alternative course of actions.

“Us”

We believe in the compounded power of team-based creativity. The performance of my team is bigger than the sum of the individual performances.

Each team member has unique skills that complement the other’s skills.

A team is a self-organizing collaborative entity. A team is not a democracy. There are business constraints to follow and objective business values to achieve with well-defined accountabilities on specific individuals. Through facilitation, a team leader will reach consent-based decisions with the team.

We embrace the customer as part of the team, the customer is our friend.

Because the customer is part of the team, we discuss technical problems as a group, with the customer, and engage the customer to be part of the decision. We recognize that customers have important feedback about the tradeoffs we are making.

We respect each other, and we assume that everyone is operating with the best intentions of the team and the customer in mind. If there are personal problems to be dealt with, we deal with them one on one and/or with team leadership. We don’t vent personal problems with the customer.

We do not linger. If the customer no longer needs us, we are happy to move on. We take the time to train our customer’s internal teams so that they can take over and manage our products. We do our best to transition all knowledge and skills when the client is ready for it, and we leave the product with the satisfaction of having set it on a proper course.

We believe in Progressive Refinement of Requirements.

We help our clients to quickly validate that the product being built fits in the real world.

We enforce a value transmission process from the mind of the client to the minds of everybody in our team in order to: 1) Understand the whole picture and in turn help us to make better decisions, and 2) Help to discover and validate the best solution.

It is the sum of these values and facts that makes us Commandos. We are able to jump into a customer’s existing idea, quickly adapt to the conditions around us, and contribute to the success of that product. When we are done, the customer is in a better place specifically because they chose to work with us.